Cynical Cinema

Final Destination (4/10):  The first Final Destination movie was two things.  Terrible and great.  In a movie that follows the conventions of the teen-horror genre, it manages to be kind of original.  Sure, there are hot young actors getting into scary situations and so forth.  But Final Destination manages to inject some life into this.  You see, a kid (Devon Sawa) has a premonition about a plane crash.  When he freaks out and demands to be let off the plane, along with several others, the plane does indeed crash.  Then Death has to even the score, and each of those who escaped death on the plane get picked off one by one.  Which means there is no real villain, it’s just Death coming out of nowhere.  Which leads to some crazy, out-of-nowhere, all-of-a-sudden death sings which are genuinely jolting.  The special effects are cheesy and bad, the dialogue is inane, and Devon Sawa is simply dreadful as the lead.  But at least people get killed in really interesting ways.  Final Destination was directed by James Wong.

Final Destination 2 (5/10):  An even more ludicrous plot than the first one, with Ali Larter, the lone survivor from the first movie, locked up in a padded cell, terrified that Death is still coming for her.  When a girl (A.J. Cook) has a premonition about a car accident, she manages to save several people.  Again, Death comes for them, and they enlist Larter’s help to defeat Death.  Then there is some nonsense about a pregnant lady and a birth interrupting the chain of death.  It is an even-more ludicrous premise and idiotic denoument than the first movie.  But what makes this movie better is simply that Cook and Larter are much better actors than Sawa, the dialogue isn’t quite as stupid, and the special effects are better.  Which means those amazing death scenes are that much more jolting.  James Wong is out for this one, and David R. Ellis replaces him as director.  He is slightly less ham-handed, but this movie is still really stupid.  It’s just stupid AND fun.

Final Destination 3 (2/10):  The worst in the series.  At this point, we’re used to the crazy, out-of-nowhere deaths.  We know what to expect.  And of course, they’re still shocking.  But this plot, (now revolving around a roller coaster accident) is amazingly preposterous, even for this series.  After a pretty decent second installment in this series, they have gone back to the people who created the first one.  James Wong is back as director, and brings all of his ineptitude to the table.  Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the girl with the premonition this time, and she is average at best.  There is a pretty good death scene involving a tanning bed.  But what makes this movie dreadful is…well many things.  Here are a few of them.  The special effects are, once again, dreadful.  The opening scene with the roller coaster is full of shaky cameras, bizarre camera tricks, and nothing cool.  The movie makes references to Abraham Lincoln and 9/11 when the kids start to investigate what’s going on.  A staggering series of leaps in logic that leaves us really angry.  We get even more angry as the death scenes, which are no longer a surprise, drag on.  And on.  And on.  Just kill them already!  We know what’s coming!  In fact, just kill this movie already.

The three movies came out in a package yesterday, courtesy of Alliance Films.  They are available in a bargain trilogy, all on just one disc.  Final Destination and Final Destination 2 are on one side of the DVD, Final Destination 3 is on the other.  There are no special features worth mentioning.  When it hit stores, there was a 2-disc edition of Final Destination 3 that allowed you to change the movie - choose how the characters die, whether they die at all - that was kind of neat.  But the movie was so bad to begin with that there was no possible way I could care about these special features.  Therefore, the best way to get this series IS on a single disc.  If you want to get it at all.

 Oh, and the FOURTH installment in this series is scheduled to be released in 2009.  Which might well make this “trilogy” incomplete.  Perhaps you’re better off waiting for Alliance to release a thirty-one disc box set of all thirty-one installments once this series has finally bled itself dry.  On the plus side - David R. Ellis will be directing the fourth movie, which means it might be pretty good, like Final Destination 2.

I’m watching American Mall right now and my brain hurts. My whole body hurts from being so tense in the ball into which I have curled myself. There is no word I could use to describe this movie other than “painful”. This is a film brought to DVD today, August 12th, by Paramount Home Entertainment, who I don’t hold responsible for this, and by the producers of High School Musical, who I DO hold personally responsible for my current state of agony. This travesty to popular culture is referred to as “a 2008 MTV Original Musical Movie”. Which begs the question for me:

Who, exactly, is the MTV target audience? Judging by The Hills and A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, it is vain, airheaded twenty-something high maintenance bimbos who care more about their hair and their last date than they do the war in Iraq and the state of the environment. That is, if they have heard of Iraq. Or the environment. Judging by Cribs and My Super Sweet Sixteen, it is vain, airheaded seventeen-year-old high maintenance bimbos who care more about the latest shade of nail polish and how cute Zac Efron looked on that Rolling Stone cover than they do about the presidential election or health care policy. Judging by the abundance of Ashlee Simpson and Hilary Duff shows, it’s vain, airheaded 12-year-old high maintenance bimbos who care more about High School Musical and the cute guy who’s friends with their older brother than they do about their grades or any constructive extra-curricular activities.

And judging by The American Mall, their audience is a bunch of bedridden, shallow, airheaded seven-year-old future sluts with the collective IQ of a potato. There is one character in this movie who uses the phrase “wait - backspace!” at least six times. The only movie in the world more idiotic, with a worse message for young girls, is Bratz. The only movie ever made that is more formulaic is Busty Backdoor Babes Volume 112. (Volume 111 actually featured one girl who was NOT a babe - surprise! And that makes it more unexpected and original than this garbage.) And there may not be another movie experience more painful than this one. Well, discounting any movie “starring” Paris Hilton.

The main message of this movie, as I understand it, is that a lovely young girl works at a mall for her lovely young mother. Who looks to be seven years older than her daughter. She has been accepted to university, but she isn’t excited about it, because she wants to be a rock star. And who doesn’t? But she meets a guy - who also wants to be a rock star! Amazing coincidence! And they fall in love! (With him listening to her through a wall, and singing along, and peeping through windows, like an uber-creepy Phantom of the Opera.) But will mom understand that she doesn’t want to go to college? Or that she can become a rock star overnight if the right person just happens to walk by? Will she and her new love form the band that will set the world on fire? OF COURSE THEY WILL.

There are several supporting characters. The star girl’s shallow slutty friends, and the star guy’s lazy stoner friends. Then, there is the Evil Bitch Girl who runs the mall even though she is clearly sixteen years old. Her daddy owns the mall, and she walks over people, and she just wants daddy’s approval and she hates everyone else and she’s so horrible! She’s going to tear the happy couple apart! She’s going to close the good girl’s store! She’s going to…drive me absolutely insane! But she’s not the only one. Every character in this movie is either painfully ordinary or agonizingly irritating. Every scenario is cliched and stupid. And the musical scenes? Enough to make me suffer skin failure.

If you pick up The American Mall, you will be willingly subjecting yourself to the 100 worst minutes on DVD this week. And if your young daughter specifically asks for it, that is great. That will indicate to you that she is already careening down a terrible path, and it’s time to do some serious parenting. She’s headed for almost certain disaster in life, and you might actually have time to stop it. Here’s step one. Don’t let her rent this movie. Rent Brokedown Palace instead and make her watch it. Step two is up to you.

Anton Yelchin is very good in Charlie Bartlett.  As the title character, and therefore star of the picture, he holds together a movie that really does not hold up on it’s own.  The movie opens with him being expelled from yet another private school, this time for laminating licenses illegally, and being taken home by his mom in a limo.  His family is fabulously wealthy, and he lives in a massive home with extremely fancy cars.  As Charlie says later, to his psychiatrist, “my family has a psychiatrist on call - how normal can I be?”  And that psychiatrist will figure prominently, albeit in a tangential way, throughout the rest of the movie.

Charlie is now forced to attend public school for the first time, and with his suit and tie and crest on his jacket, he immediately runs afoul of the school’s cartoon bully, played by Tyler Hilton.  However, he soon discovers that the medication his psychiatrist has prescribed for him, while it doesn’t do what it’s intended to do, is in high demand.  He figures he could hook up with this bully (the school drug dealer) in order to make some money and, by extension, some friends.  Clearly Charlie Bartlett doesn’t need money.  But he does need friends, and illegal enterprise has proven, we assume, thoughout his life, to provide him with those friends.

This is a venue that is never fully explored - how Charlie Bartlett is either a kid trying to make his way through the perils of “popularity” in high school, or perhaps he is a kid who is just smarter and wiser than all the other kids.  Toward the end of the film, that discrepancy is addressed, but in a fairly lame, conventional and unsatisfying way.  Robert Downey Jr. is underused as the school principal, who is a well-intentioned drunk whose life is falling apart.  He’s great in the role, his downward spiral coinciding almost exactly with Charlie Bartlett’s upward turn.  Which leads to, of course, a substantial confrontation between the two.  But again, Downey’s transformation is never fully explored, and is equally unsatisfying.

Really, this movie is very good until the midway point, as Charlie Bartlett becomes the coolest kid in school - providing psychiatric drugs and informal bathroom-stall counselling to his fellow high schoolers.  But the second half is so chaotic, and makes so little sense in spots, that it feels merely like a series of events that have little relation to each other.  And when the movie finally grinds to an end, the only word I can think of to use is “unsatisfying”.  The premise is good - the execution is flawed - and the finale is unsatisfying, at best.

Seth Rogen was clearly the fat kid in high school. The funny fat kid, mind you, but also the one who was picked on a little. Which is why, in every movie he writes, the fat kid gets all the best lines. It worked amazingly well in Superbad with Jonah Hill, and it works almost as well in Drillbit Taylor, out tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The fat kid in Drillbit Taylor is played by Troy Gentile, who is almost as good as Hill in Superbad. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that promise.

Because really, Drillbit Taylor is nothing but a “prequel” to Superbad. The same characters are there - the geeky best friends, one fat one mild-mannered and skinny. Their third friend who is far geekier than either. And the fat kid is still actively trying to get rid of the even-nerdier kid, because he will bring them down in the eyes of the “cool kids”. So - the kids from Superbad, four years earlier. Seth Rogen co-wrote the script for this film with Kristofor Brown, and Judd Apatow produced the movie, so the pieces were in place to make something on the level of Superbad, if not Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin. But…this movie sucks.

It’s not Owen Wilson’s fault. He plays his standard, overly-sincere loser character. But the movie isn’t written to fit his style, his style isn’t adjusted to fit the movie, and he feels miscast because every scene he’s in is worse than every scene where it’s just the kids on their own. And Wilson is in almost every scene. He plays a homeless man who poses as a bodyguard to get hired by some kids to protect them from the high school bully. In order to do this, he poses as a substitute teacher at the school. Making him a homeless guy posing as a bodyguard posing as a teacher. Why is he homeless? He doesn’t have a substance abuse problem or a mental problem. And he seems to be more than willing to work for money - in fact, he’s going WAY out of his way to fake his way into this job…it doesn’t make sense.

Also fairly strange is the school bully. I don’t remember school having bullies like this, ever. Bullying in schools usually involved the threat of force and the teasing and the shoving, but never punching kids and beating them and attacking them on a daily basis. These bullies are implausible, but then if they weren’t so mean and violent, the little kids wouldn’t need a bodyguard. I guess. And the young kids are bullied their first day of school in grade nine by some kids who are 18 years old and clearly, at least, in grade twelve. So…how come they’re in the same classes? Are we to believe that the bullies have failed every single year they’ve spent in high school? Or just that nobody bothered to think that through?

In the end, these are the minor problems with Drillbit Taylor. The major problem, amazingly enough, is the script. Other than some truly memorable lines from Troy Gentile, there is nothing funny about the rest of the movie. At all. Owen Wilson is not funny. His character is not funny. His sexual conquest of another teacher at the school is not funny. The other two kids are not funny. The bully is not funny. And the concept, while kind of interesting on the surface, is never explored at all. This ends up being exactly like every other overcoming a high school bully movie, and might actually be the most predictable movie in years. The second we meet Owen Wilson, as Drillbit Taylor, we know exactly what will happen, in every scene, for the entire rest of the movie.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have managed to turn standard movie arcs and plots into true gold. Superbad was so funny and smart that you forgot very fast that you had seen this exact movie many times before. Just never that funny. Knocked Up was a movie many others have made in the past - but writing it from the guy’s perspective was something the fifty-five movies like it had never thought to do. And it was so funny and smart that you forgot you’d seen it before. But Drillbit Taylor is not one of these movies.

I think the success of their oeuvre has made Apatow and Rogen such sought-after commodities that studios and producers will purchase absolutely anything they do. And if that includes a throwaway script that they wrote in high school and never edited and forgot about for fifteen years, then so be it. Which is, I think, what happened in the case of Drillbit Taylor. This movie is a total waste of time.

It’s a Boy Girl thing comes out tomorrow, June 24th, from Alliance Films. It’s a teen comedy with a familiar plot twist. The high school all-star quarterback and the really nerdy girl who lives next to him somehow switch bodies. And so now the nerdy girl learns all about being the football star, and the quarterback learns about being the nerdy girl, and they eventually fall in love with each other. Blah blah blah. These comedies are normally incredibly predictable, boring and painfully-PG. But there is good news here! This movie - is R-rated! There is nudity! And swearing! Maybe, just maybe, this one has a chance!

But NO! This is still the exact same movie as all the others. The smart chick who’s hotter than the head cheerleader, but no one sees it because she’s smart and nerdy and really into her grades and wants to go to Yale. The quarterback who can’t escape his destiny, the one who’s worried that this is all I’ll ever be! And even coming out of the mouths of people of different sexes, it’s still the same movie. And the hookup between the Shakespeare-reading hottie and the all-star athlete hottie at the end of the movie is the most painful cliche in high school teen comedies. I feel like screaming at the screen - Dude! It’s high school! You won’t be together for more than a year! It’s high school! This will not be the love of a lifetime here. You’re not going to get married. You are going to break up in college and sleep with everyone you meet. THAT is how this is going to work.

But the biggest sin this movie commits is not going all-out. It occupies some irritating middle ground between what could have been and what always is. If you’re going to show boobs and coarse language, and two hot people have switched bodies, go with it. Show the guy, in the hot babe’s body, playing with her boobs because he can. Show him hanging out in the girl’s locker room, looking at all the boobs. Show the girl “accidentally” grazing the boobs of the other hot chicks who are also naked. Show her (with her guy’s mind) trying to hit on a hot chick. Show the virginal, never-been-with-a-boy chick playing around with the new guy’s body, seeing how things work. Or reaching in a fascinated manner for other guys’ junk. There is potential for masturbation jokes, lesbian scenes, homosexual humour and general mayhem with actual useful nudity and the clever use of over-the-top profanity.

OK, this is the movie I’m seeing in my head. This is the movie I WANT to see. In fact, this may well be the movie I want to make. If you’re going to do a movie like this, go ALL OUT! Half-assing it is the worst thing you can do with the concept. And yet, this movie totally half-asses it. And it kills me. And it kills this movie. Samaire Armstrong is absolutely gorgeous, one of the hottest women in movies right now, and I assume that Kevin Zegers is some kind of gorgeous up-and-coming boy toy for the ladies. But that alone can’t be a reason to watch. And this movie doesn’t give you any other reason. So…don’t watch.

My memory is spotty when it comes to the first incarnation of Degrassi. Oh, I remember that Joey Jeremiah character with his funny hat, and Snake and Wheels and the hot chicks - Spike and Caitlin. And I remember I hated watching that show. Not so much because I didn’t like it, but because every single show dealt with a controversial subject and high school-age children. And after the show was over, my mom would try to get me to talk about it. “What do you think about abortion?” she would say. And I would squirm and fidget and try to escape to my room. I don’t know! I’m ten years old. I have no opinion on abortion yet. I liked the character in the show who had one, so I’m…pro-abortion? Can I go now?

Degrassi: The Next Generation, Season 6, is out on DVD May 27th from Alliance Films. And I just watched it. My recollection of the original being suspect as it is, I have no idea how this new one measures up. And perhaps my hindsight is from the perspective of a ten-year-old, and that is colouring my opinions some, but this new version of Degrassi seems watered down. And it seems more…Hollywood, I guess. For one thing, this new Degrassi stars way more hot chicks. WAY more. I think I liked the realism of the old show, in that not every girl was a knockout. It was more…real. And the one I remember, Caitlin, was just the really-hot chick in comparison. Like, a real high school.

And sure, this new Degrassi deals with the same stuff as the old one, only a little updated for today’s world. Season Six has episodes that deal with wars over girls, crippled guys trying to have sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, teen mothers, and - the modern twist - internet nudity. There is even a stabbing and a murder! But somehow this modernized version of Degrassi feels dumbed-down. Most of the actors are good, with a few exceptions, and the writing seems to be as good as ever. And so I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this new Next Generation show miss the mark. I think, and I really mean this, that it is the attractive women. Not only do most of them look too old for high school, but they also look like they come from Central Model Casting. And that gives an air of fakery to the school itself. The old Degrassi students looked like they came from, well, high school. As far as I remember.

That being said, once I put in disc one of Degrassi: The Next Generation Season Six, I had to see the second disc. And the third. I actually got into the show and wanted to see what happened next. I hardly cared about any of the characters, or their motivations or their drama, but the story lines are good and they’ll suck you in! Degrassi! Who would have thought? And I also liked the appearance of Snake from the original series, whose name in this series is … Snake. He’s now a teacher at Degrassi. Named Snake. Well, props to the old school, I suppose. A tip of the hat to that show that once rocked the world, in this one that merely rocked one Thursday afternoon for me.